| The Portable Show and The Emotional Guidance System, two very different exhibitions were recently on display at the Broadways Gallery NYC. Italian curator and writer Stefania Carrozzini who curated both group shows brought together ten Italian artists for The Portable Show which created a compelling mix of technical approaches, all of them speaking to dreamlike and liminal states. Natalia Berselli, Alessandra Cocchi, Adriana Collovati, Marcello Diotallevi, Anna Ghisleni, Live Art, Silva Nirone, Annalisa Picchioni, Paola Scialpi, and Karl Stengel. For the show the curator contributes a text called Art Travels in Time and Space of Creation. “Art travels and its vectors are physical and mental. It expands on the net; it dematerializes, yet at the same time it does not abandon substance and takes shape in all living forms; it maintains an outer layer, a shape that is perceivable in the real spatial and temporal dimension. |  |
Simone Cappa on The Portable Show and The Emotional Guidance System.
The Portable Show and The Emotional Guidance System, two very different exhibitions were recently on display at the Broadways Gallery NYC. Italian curator and writer Stefania Carrozzini who curated both group shows brought together ten Italian artists for The Portable Show which created a compelling mix of technical approaches, all of them speaking to dreamlike and liminal states. Natalia Berselli, Alessandra Cocchi, Adriana Collovati, Marcello Diotallevi, Anna Ghisleni, Live Art, Silva Nirone, Annalisa Picchioni, Paola Scialpi, and Karl Stengel.
For the show the curator contributes a text called Art Travels in Time and Space of Creation. “Art travels and its vectors are physical and mental. It expands on the net; it dematerializes, yet at the same time it does not abandon substance and takes shape in all living forms; it maintains an outer layer, a shape that is perceivable in the real spatial and temporal dimension. Everything is in constant movement, things, ideas, and people. They leave traces of energy in space. Time, in the game of creation, unites them in a unique design.” The exhibition was composed of 60 artworks, small-sized, mixed media, digital photographs, paintings, and drawings. Each of the artists approaches the notion of transience through his or her own innovative mode.
In his colorful Abstract Expressionist canvases, Karl Stengel aims to capture the mood, nature, and ephemerality of place, while simultaneously transcending these very qualities, capturing something even more ineffable. Alessandra Cocchi’s approach is through her poetic contemplation of beauty—in her case, using the elegance of flowers as a form to abstract sculptures. Her subtley-layered abstractions done in opaque pigments, colored gessoes, and pastels are transient and light, capturing a sense of eternal grace, elegance, and purity. The same kind of delicate layering is also evident in the work of both Natalia Berselli and Adriana Collovati, each to a different effect. Berselli’s diaphanous abstractions evoke the immateriality of poetic space through their finely textured and hazy surfaces, achieving a sense of peace and positivity. Executed in paint on canvas, Berselli’s compositions connect us to our primitive past through their primal, earthy, unpretentious, and even spiritual qualities.
Marcello Diotallevi and Anna Ghisleni both work within the idiom of impressionistic abstraction. Similarly, Live Art and Silva Nirone’s forms and compositions aim to create a dynamic tension between the conscious and unconscious elements of their work. Annalisa Picchioni’s works employ sensual color and Surrealist imagery, amplifying the notion of dreamlike states. Paola Scialpi’s work employs a cinematic aesthetic, which floated through the gallery like a cloud. The Portable Show transports us from the conscious to the unconscious, the earthly to the celestial, inviting us to transcend our daily experiences.
The Emotional Guidance System: From Fear to Joy also brought together eight artists from Italy whose work deals with the human experience of emotion. Fillippo Barbieri, Daniela Billi, Annamaria Cimbal, Miriam de Berardis, Antonella Lagana, Silvia Pisani, Stefano Saba and Clara Scarampella presented viewers with a complex censorial experience, positioned as a platform for contemplation. Focused on channels of emotions as energy, captured by an open mind and heart, the artists utilized an array of mediums—including photography, paintings, and sculptures. Through their works the artists testified their awareness about emotions that occurred during ordinary time and life, but also as mysterious and inexplicable force that lead our creative process and our lives.
Drawing on theoretical discourse related to the semantics of desire and difference, curator Carrozzini constructs a platform for multiple investigations of liminal space through The Emotional Guidance System: From Fear to Joy. Each artist evinces a unique reading of the central themes of the exhibition, a fact that results in a welcomed diversity in terms of the modes of conceptualization and practice on view in the show.
Utilizing the painting as a point of departure, Miriam de Berardis presents her work with a physicality and vibrancy of technique that seeks to enhance the gestural quality of emotion. Similarly transgressing thresholds between two differential existential planes is the work of Fillippo Barbieri and Daniela Billi depict forms excavate the psychological evaluation of “the other” through a representation of the complex mental barriers that separate people. Antonella Lagana leaves behind a physical testimony of human authenticity in her works. Traces of an actual physical world are transformed into a simulacrum on the canvas. Clara Scarampella investigates figuration and the body, but as a mode of questioning physical alienation. In her most compelling work, she transcends the postmodern perspective. Here she self-consciously emphasizes the subject-object looking relationship, making the subject (or viewer) painfully self-aware of his objectifying gaze of “the other”, resulting in a reevaluation of the hegemonic structures informing the looking relationship they participate in. Pushing the envelope of painterly practices, are several distinct abstract artists exploring the boundaries between the real and “the other” as a space. Silvia Pisani submerges herself into a series of subconscious spaces, depicting the duality of agency inherent to the creative process itself. Depicting primary-colored abstract shapes that hover playfully on a field of white, Stefano Saba seems to emphasize the artist’s creative agency, as well as the subject-object dilemma. By creating engaging forms from the negative space, he challenges the viewer to reevaluate the real subject of the works—is it the colored shapes, the spaces between them, or the interplay between the two?
Through a broad range of styles and media, the artwork on view in both The Portable Show and The Emotional Guidance System stimulates in the viewer an awareness of difference, whether that difference was between opposing subjects, divergent forms, or even between the artwork and the viewer themselves.
